In light of the fact that some people have reported that people are being class reductionist on this site, I would like to say that class reductionism is reactionary and has nothing to do with Marxism or Anarchism.
The class vs identity debate is incredibly silly, and I hate that it keeps coming up amongst people. The fact is that there is no class vs idpol conflict. Heres why:
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Communism is incompatible with any coercive or oppressive system, for it is defined as the absence of those things.
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If we want to achieve communism and defeat oppressive systems we need working-class solidarity
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The working class includes BIPOC, Women, Disabled people and LGBT people
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Working class solidarity means having solidarity with all of these people and uniting our struggles together.
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All of the major successful revolutionary movements understood this.
What happened to the class reductionists? Did they achieve anything? Did they get any advancements for the working class they claimed to represent? They did not, because in being reactionaries they cut off important allies, limited the scope of their struggles, and would sooner side with the bourgeoisie than with other oppressed groups.
So to conclude, intersectionality and trans liberation are good and necessary, and anyone who still believes in class reductionist ideas can fuck off. You are a nothing more than a crypto Strasserite and will wreck the movement if not dealt with properly.
then you have a problem. because the foundation has to include everyone’s basic struggles or it’s a shitty porous, un-cured concrete that will shatter the moment it meets resistance.
You have to care about all of it or none of it is worth shit all. You can’t build a foundation of solidarity over only white-cishet problems and expect it to support the struggles of minorities.
but at the same time the focus is on intersectionality & intersubjectivity and the solidarity that arises through recognizing working class division is itself along these same lines. gender and race & ethnicity & heteronormativity being primary ways that individuals are exploited & oppressed within the class structure from one generation to another.
politics of unbridgeable difference must be avoided, and these axes of oppression have to be analyzed from broader sociological vantages and societal concerns rather than only individual grievances. As Stokely Carmichael said:
“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”
So, we can’t get into the habit of marketing individual wokeness expecting this alone to change the underlying material & structural divisions that function within and through specific backward norms & culturally inherited baggage. The only way to climb out of that pit is through recognition of that base exploitative system which forces us to recognize one another
Capitalism didn’t spring up out of a vacuum, it’s not some magically evil system that is making everyone “act bad”. Capitalism was intentionally created by the powerful and wealthy as an attempt to continue justifying the existing power hierarchy.
Racism isn’t bad because of capitalism. Racism is bad because it tries to justify an unjust hierarchy. Capitalism just happens to be the hierarchy that stands behind it now.
it’s not enough to just be anti-capitalist and address the class struggle at that level. you have to face and crush all justifications for hierarchy lest capitalism just be replaced by another unjust system.